Radiative transfer is an important or a dominant mode of energy transport in the nature and many applications such as light propagation through a turbulent atmosphere, electromagnetic waves propagating in plasmas, seismic wave propagation, light propagation in biological tissue, heat transfer in high-temperature semitransparent media, design of solar collectors, combustion process, crystal growth, neutron transport, optical tomography, particle detection and sizing, laser interaction with matter, energy transport in plasma, stellar atmospheres, remote sensing, optical communication, and micro/nanoscale systems. In macroscopic scales, light propagation is controlled by radiative transfer equation that is the complex partial differential integral equation, and in microscopic scales, light propagation is controlled by Maxwell equations. In most cases, it is very difficult to obtain analytical solutions of radiative transfer or light propagation problems, and numerical simulation is becoming a powerful tool in the study of radiative transfer.

Knowledge and understanding of radiative transfer behavior and its influencing factors will lead to the further development of heat transfer, atmospheric and ocean optics, optical imaging, plasma physics, ultrafast optics, and so on. We invite investigators to contribute original research articles that will develop new physical and mathematical models and novel numerical techniques for radiative transfer or present improvement of existing numerical methods, examine new processes of radiative transfer and radiative transfer problem in complex media, present new concepts and new insight about the relevant physical processes, and describe further applications of radiative transfer in engineering.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Novel numerical techniques for the solution to radiation transfer
• Radiative transfer in optically complex media
• Radiative heat transfer coupled with conduction, convection, turbulence, and chemical kinetics
• Inverse problem of radiative transfer
• Transient radiative transfer
• Vector radiative transfer
• Nano- and microscale radiative transfer
• Applications of radiative transfer in engineering applications